Reasons of State (38 page)

This other root—known as Leap-frog—looking like a
terrified flying lemur because it is running in the uttermost panic without moving, recalls Rio de Janeiro. The Itamaraty district, amongst municipal buildings crowded with acromegalic statues (always one and a half times or two and three quarter times as large as the real figure of the hero or important figure they are supposed to immortalise), has shops full of embalmed animals: boas gazing through glass marbles, armadillos, ounces, herons, monkeys, and even dusty, saddled horses, which appear to be standing waiting on their green wooden pedestals for a rider who never arrives—who is dead perhaps and has long been lying under a flamboyant Portuguese tomb. This other root, a sort of gnome whose stomach-head swings between feeble limbs—he is called “Humpty-Dumpty”—comes from Port-au-Prince, where in the district of La Frontière, between taverns built of planks and musty Voodoo charms, naked negresses lie in woven hammocks awaiting their visitors with supreme haughtiness, as if lost in their own thoughts, far away, and unconsciously imitating with a hand lying softly open over their stiff pubic curls the gesture of Manet’s
Olympia
.

Next the Consul shows me “Erasmus of Rotterdam,” a Veracruzan root in the style of Holbein and looking very much like a pensive humanist; “Pichrochole” and “Ragamuffin,” bamboo roots with the aggressive appearance of German mercenaries, and bristling with nails; “Chimera,” with a long beak and battlemented crest; “Kikimora,” dishevelled and spurred, and those three shoots from a single stem known as the “Pieds-Nickelés” (familiar to me because I had subscribed for years to the Parisian paper
L’Épatant
—a fact not generally known); and a little farther back a Romanesque monstrosity of a Cuban mangrove, called the “Spanish Heretic,” next to the liana ballerina “Anna Pavlova”; and the “Cyclops,” who, with his red stone buried in his forehead, seems to be
watching over a wild world arranged on brackets, wherein live the “Hydra of Larna,” “Rackham’s Witch,” riding on a broomstick that is part of herself, “The Silent Woman,” seemingly cut from basalt of vegetable origin and (without direct allusion to feminine forms) a figure of curves and turgidity, of superimposed roundnesses, of flexions and hollows, arousing unambiguous recollections in the hands raised to feel them.

The truth was that because of the eccentricity of his culture and his understanding of languages—unusual in a North American—the Consul was beginning to figure as a dream element in the real daytime nightmare now being experienced by eyes that were all too wide open—as I descended into the depths of terror with the help of alcohol; although I had hardly emerged from the vapour of one or two drinks when the sweat of anxiety broke out on the nape of my neck, my forehead, in my grey hairs, over a ground bass of hammering heartbeats so violent that I thought they were in the armchair where I was sitting. And now the Yankee is sitting in front of a harmonium in the corner, pulling out three stops, pressing down the pedals, and he begins playing something bearing a relation to the music that invaded my country many years ago, although it’s more angular and full of contrasts and accents, of course, than such tunes as “Whispering” or “Three o’Clock in the Morning,” so often heard recently in the capital. With his fingers still restlessly moving, marking time with his head and releasing the notes with the casual automatism of popular music:

“I’m a southerner … New Orleans. White enough to pass as a white man, although my hair—well, my hair would be too frizzy if it weren’t for the pomades they make to deal with that. (
B flat
, damn you!) I’ve ‘crossed the line,’ as we say there, although in
sentimental
matters, as you might call them, I only get on well with darkies. That way I take after my great-uncle
Gottschalk, a musician—you wouldn’t know him—who, though preferred to Chopin by Théophile Gautier, adored by the same Lamartinian and philharmonic nymphs who went to bed with Franz Liszt, celebrated in Europe, favoured by royalty, friend of the Queen of Spain, ten times decorated, yet suddenly left all this (public, palaces, coaches, lackeys) to respond to the imperious, urgent call of negresses and mulattos waiting in the tropics to reclaim from him what was theirs by temporary right of conquest. And he followed them to Cuba, Puerto Rico, all the Antilles, rejuvenated, adventurous, liberated from protocol and honours, restored to the billing and cooing of early days, to his adolescent appetite, finally going to die in Brazil, where the Sacred Places of his peregrination also abounded—and how! ‘
Et les servantes de ta mère, grandes filles luisantes, remuaient leurs jambes chaudes près de toi qui tremblait … sa bouche avait le goût des pommes-roses, dans la rivière, avant midi.
’ ” (I don’t know who wrote what he had just recited, but I do remember, yes, I remember that when my daughter, Ofelia, was learning the piano she played some charming Creole dances by that same Moreau Gottschalk, and that I was told how he once let loose on Havana a symphony he had written, including thunderous African drums among its instruments.)

The Consul goes on: “He was a friend, a very great friend of the amazing W. C. Handy, who wrote this ‘Memphis Blues’ I’m playing now.” From there he passes to the “St. Louis Blues” by the same Handy, which has the effect of rousing the Mayorala and starting her off dancing—and probably very well, because she suits her steps and swaggering movements magnificently to the rhythms of music quite new to her.

“It’s that they’ve got it in their blood,” says the southerner. I look at his hands moving over the keys: it’s a sort of dialogue—sometimes a battle—opposition and agreement
between the female hand (the right) and the male hand (the left), which combine, complement each other, respond, but in a synchronisation that is situated both within and outside the rhythm. The Mayorala, as though under the spell of a novelty that she is absorbing through her skin, sits herself down on the harmonium stool, making sexy, enveloping and brazen movements with her shoulders, with one buttock unsupported because there isn’t room for both in the space left by the Consul. He forgets his keys and presses his face to Elmira’s neck, while she laughs as though being tickled, letting herself be sniffed with the delight of a Christian penetrating the perfumed ambit left by a censer.

“Leave Baudelaire alone!” I cry, jealous at this incursion into my own territory, first ploughed and tilled by me more than twenty years ago, and always yielding to my desires ever since, and which now that I had lost everything was all that I had left, the only plot ruled over by me in a country that was mine yesterday, mine from north to south, from ocean to ocean, and now reduced to a wretched shed made of rotten planks, filled with dead roots, a beggarly landing stage, where I must wait for tomorrow’s launch—how far away, remote, unattainable that
tomorrow
seemed!—fated to be smuggled out of here like contraband goods, like a dead man’s coffin in a rich hospital, from here, where I had been the master of men, destinies, and property. Hauling her up by one arm, I drag the Mayorala from where her sexual behaviour is exceeding what is admissible, and push her into an armchair in the corner of the room.

“That’s better,” says the gringo, laughing, “because
that
is what sunk me in my career.” This word
career
—diplomacy, presumably—in the other man’s mouth, in view of who he is and where he is, is associated in my mind with the epithet of “great nonsense” given by Don Quixote to a chivalrous romance badly represented by the figures in an altarpiece. For every Latin American of my generation, a
career
is a sinecure involving little work and much pleasure, in embassies surrounded by scenes from grand opera, Italian marbles and the lights of Versailles, with violins on the platform, waltzers in braided uniforms and low-cut dresses, solemn ushers, chamberlains in knee-breeches, intrigues, soirées, love affairs, alcoves, romance, the manners of the Marqués de Bradomin and the wit of Talleyrand, prodigies of tact and “savoir vivre,” much too remote generally from the notions of our own people, who never succeeded in absorbing the rules of etiquette and who—through not asking, and not taking advice—committed errors such as (it happened in my palace) arranging for the “Rondo alla turca” to be played when Abdul-Amid’s ambassador was presenting his credentials, or Huerta’s “Hymn of Riego” for one of Alfonso XIII’s ministers.

“Everything went well with me,” went on the southerner, “until they found out in Paris that I went too often to a Martiniquan dance hall in the Rue Blomet. Since then, I have only filled brilliant posts in North American diplomacy. Consul in Aracajú, in Antigua, in Guanta, in Mollendo, in Jacmel, and even in Manta, opposite the beaches of which sharks appear at noon every day with a punctuality comparable only to that of the Apostles in Strasbourg Cathedral. And now I am here, which is the devil’s own hideout. And it’s because they knew” (he was looking at the Mayorala) “that I … well, you and I understand each other.” He played an arpeggio. “If I were to show myself as I now am at my birthplace I should be
lynched by the cowled members of the Ku Klux Klan; chaps with white souls and white robes, with that peculiar whiteness, very much ours, which was also Benjamin Franklin’s, according to whom the negro was ‘the animal who ate most and produced least’; the whiteness of Mount Vernon, where a slave owner used to philosophise about the equality of men before God; the whiteness of our Capitol, the temple where the hymn of the Gettysburg Address is sung—‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’—with a chorus of negro street sweepers, boot blacks, ash-can emptiers, and lavatory attendants; whiteness of our most illustrious White House, where the roundabout of uniforms, frock coats and top hats is organised, which in this Latin America of ours brings thieves and sons of bitches to the fore—present company not excepted—with each turn of the handle.”

I remarked to the Consul that the epithet “son of a bitch” was rather strong in tone for someone who barely forty-eight hours ago was Head of State of a free and sovereign nation, which, as to heroic antecedents, great men, history, etc., etc.

“If my tongue was loosened, it was the fault of Santa Inés,” said the Consul, filling my glass. “I had no desire to be offensive. Besides …”

“Look, look!” said the Mayorala in a tone that boded no good, inviting us by gestures to go close to a small window with broken panes giving onto the bay.

“Yes,” said the gringo, “something is going on there on the wharf.” He opened the exit hatches of the—hitherto non-existent—racing launches. Over there, towards the end of the quay used by sugar boats, something strange was undoubtedly happening. A crowd had collected around one or two lorries—the same they had seen a little time ago, which were loaded with enormous objects, upright or horizontal, a bazaar of shapes laid crossways and in disorder, which …

“Take the binoculars,” said the Consul to me. I looked. Singing and dancing tipsily, people were lowering from lorries and throwing into the sea, with roars of laughter and shouts, busts and heads and statues of me that had years ago been officially set up in schools, colleges, town halls, public offices, town and village squares, or one-horse dumps, where they had often kept company with some Lourdes Grotto or rusticised niche full of candles and tapers always kept lit in honour of our Divine Shepherdess. And there were marble figures, the work of local sculptors or pupils of the School of Fine Arts; and there were bronze busts, cast in Italy in the same foundry where Aldo Nardini’s gigantic Republic had seen the light; standing statues—the full figure—in tailcoat with crosses and ribbon in relief, as general of the armies (with such an exaggerated kepi that my enemies used to say there was “a peak in advance and a peak in retreat”), and as Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of San Lucas (this had been in 1909) in cap and gown with a tassel falling over the left shoulder, as a Roman patrician, as a tribune making some sort of signal with his arm (inspired to some extent by the statue of Gambetta in Paris), as a thoughtful paterfamilias; a stern Mentor, as Cincinnatus crowned with laurels—now all these were lying prostrate, carried on stretchers, loaded onto carts and barrows, drawn by oxen, dragged along and thrown into the water, one after another, with crowbars and the rhythmic shoving of men and women together: “one … two … threeeee.” Finally my equestrian statue appeared—the one I used to see every day from the palace balconies—lying on a railway truck, but now without its rider, because the rider had been torn down on the night of my flight, leaving only the bronze horse. And the horse, hoisted to an erect position by a crane and deprived of Him who used to control his bit from above, rose for a moment in one
final heroic rearing movement before plunging into a sheet of foam.

“
Memento homo
,” I said, leaving the rest unsaid, because the classical phrase had suddenly been supplanted in my mind by the recollection of a cruel joke the Student had made at my expense.

“Don’t make fun of the text of the Requiem,” said the Consul. “Now those statues of yours are resting at the bottom of the sea; they’ll turn green with saltpetre, corals will cling to them, and sand cover them. And in the year 2500 or 3000 a dredger’s scoop will come across them and bring them to light again. And people will ask, in the tone of Arvers’ sonnet: ‘And who was this man?’ and very likely no one will be able to answer. It will happen just as it did to the Roman sculptures of the worst period that one sees in so many museums: all that’s known about them is that they represent
A Gladiator
,
A Patrician
, or
A Centurion
. The names are lost. In your case they’ll say: ‘Bust, or statue, of A
Dictator
. There have been so many and there still will be in this hemisphere that his name isn’t important.’ ” (He picked up a book lying on a table.) “Do you figure in
Pequeño Larousse?
No?… Well, then, that’s the end of you.”